Power-scaling Rules for Marvel and DC Comics
Explanation There are several massive problems with using powerscaling for these two prominent franchises that have shared hundreds of different authors over several decades to a mostly unique extent for entertainment media. Said writers naturally tend to have extremely varied opinions and sensibilities, which is reflected in their stories. They are often completely uninterested in internal story logic regarding relative power levels, mostly tend to use personal favouritism and plot convenience to decide the outcome of confrontations, to avoid making them too predictable, are regularly completely inconsistent even within their own stories, and most importantly, the enormous contradictions in continuities, power levels, and comparative hierarchies between the many different writers and editors over the decades. A few of many more blatant example include Captain America, an ordinary snake, or a similarly regular gorilla beating the Hulk; to Black Panther placing the Silver Surfer in an inescapable grip; Iceman defeating Oblivion; Dormammu beating Multi-Eternity in one story, to be manhandled by Cyclops, or Frankenstein's Monster in other tales; or the Beyonders killing the Living Tribunal and all of Marvel's abstract entities, only to be killed by Starbrand, Ex Nihilo, or Doctor Doom. However, this is not the only type of inconsistency. The fundamental natures, sizes, structures, continuities, etcetera of many different concepts and objects also tend to vary greatly from story to story, and take note that one concept, object, ofr character can be dramatically stronger in one story, while other ones can be dramatically weaker. Just because a certain character displays a certain extreme degree of power in one instant doesn't remotely mean that it will remotely possess the same scale of power in another, and that we can automatically scale from the higher instance to another character. We also cannot automatically use the relative power levels for one author in the 1960s and apply it to another present day author, or vice versa. Again, one writer's canonicity cannot automatically be used to scale from another's. To illustrate, Marvel's executive editor Tom Brevoort, who is also in charge of writing the official handbooks for the company, and is very likely the greatest current authority regarding the company's internal continuity and power levels, had this to say regarding the topic: "I get the sense that, somewhere, there’s a might battle boards-style discussion going on about the Sentry. And I try to stay out of those. But I will say that the transitive property has never applied to super heroes. After all, the Fantastic Four and Iron Man and even the Man-Thing have defeated the Molecule Man in the past, and doing so didn’t make them anything more than themselves." ”We need to stop thinking of these power relationships in such simple linear and black and white terms. if real life worked like that, there’d be no need for sporting events of any kind–you could tell which person or team was going to win without a game, from just looking at the stats.” And according to Stan Lee, whoever wins in a fight simply depends on whoever the current writer likes best: Hence, Marvel and DC (the latter company functions in much the same way, with largely the same writers at different points in their careers) are strictly interested in the storytelling itself, not in power-scaling, which is all fine and good for their purposes to entertain the readers, but it runs contrary to our purposes to index the characters here in this wiki, and we cannot continue to systematically gloss over this fact, as it creates extremely unreliable and misleading results. If we use cumulative power scaling for Marvel characters, in terms of that that one character defeated or stood up to an objectively far more powerful character, who did the same to an objectively far more powerful character, who did the same to an objectively far more powerful character applied to all of Marvel's history, we would likely eventually end up with Captain America and other characters of the same level powerscaled to the Beyonders. That said, we can obviously continue to use power scaling for more internally consistent franchises helmed by a single or unified creative voice. The problematic key issue is the staggering amount of different writers and stories for Marvel and DC characters over their several decades of existence. Conclusions Given the long history of Marvel and DC, we are still able to get fairly reliable statistics for quite a lot of characters even without power-scaling between different writers: 1) Feats: The most basic and reliable method for power-scaling would be direct feats. However, the feats should preferably be somewhat consistent, and elseworld and alternative continuity feats are not acceptable for power-scaling. 2) Case-by-case basis: We can still use powerscaling for Marvel and DC, if a certain character is explicitly shown at a certain degree of power within a story, and another character legitimately matches that power. For example, the Anti-Monitor at the peak of his power was matched by the Spectre (with a boost from the other DC heroes). This is fairly reasonable. However, the Spectre almost matching Michael Demiurgos over a decade earlier than when Michael was established as capable of creating a full 11-dimensional multiverse under another writer seems far less reliable. There was no indication that Michael had anywhere near that level of power within the story that their fight took place. If a certain author portrays a character at a certain degree of power within a near time period, and has another character match it, powerscaling can also work, but even here it is important to use common sense regarding inconsistencies for story purposes. 3) Official comparisons: If the handbooks officially list certain characters as equal this can be used as a gauge in more logical instances. For example, Kryptonians should logically be of similar levels of power to each other. 4) Single Statistics power-scaling: An inherent misunderstanding of power-scaling is the use of superiority of one statistic to power-scale all other statistics. This is highly inaccurate, and leads to flawed statistics listings. As such, power-scaling will only be done in a ”stat-by-stat” approach. 5) Consistency: If one character has been depicted to be superior to another consistently, then logically speaking, the stronger character an be power-scaled off the weaker, if the weaker character has displayed greater practical feats in stories written by the relevant authors in question. 6) Common sense: Common sense will also be necessary to distinguish between outliers and proper feats. As such, certain power-scaling will be accepted only with community consensus. Help to go through and find errors to be corrected within our Marvel and DC character profiles is greatly appreciated. ” Category:General Category:Important